05/20/2026
For the young women going out to get a home loan (or any type of credit), think about how different your life would be, if this set of circumstances had not happened and this woman had not taken the actions which she did. Remember her. This is a true story, I and my family worked in the credit reporting industry and this change happened in my lifetime. Before 1974, you (a female) could not have gotten any type of credit without a man signing for you and saying it was "OK". https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1LdR8CnEPu/
In October 1972, a twin-engine Cessna 310 took off from Anchorage, Alaska, carrying House Majority Leader Hale Boggs. The plane flew into the Chugach Mountains and vanished. The military searched for thirty-nine days. They found nothing.
Back in New Orleans, his wife Lindy ran for his empty congressional seat. She was fifty-seven years old, a grandmother, a former schoolteacher, and a political operator who had spent decades standing behind one of the most powerful men in Washington. Her colleagues expected her to be a quiet placeholder. A grieving widow. Someone who would vote reliably and not make noise.
Then she sat down on the House Banking and Currency Committee and started reading the draft of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.
She knew this territory personally. After Hale's plane disappeared, she had discovered something that should have been obvious but wasn't — that despite having a solid income and managing her own household for decades, she had no independent access to credit in her own name. No credit history. No standing with a bank. Nothing that was hers.
She had been the wife of the House Majority Leader. And she still needed a man to co-sign.
So when she read the committee's draft — carefully written to protect borrowers from discrimination based on race, age, and veteran status — and saw that women were absent from the text entirely, she recognized it immediately. Not as malice. As a blind spot so deep it was invisible to the men in the room.
She didn't call for a debate. She didn't request the floor.
She picked up a pen. She found the paragraph listing the protected classes. In the margin, she wrote: s*x or marital status.
Then she stood up, walked down the hall to the committee's copying machine, fed her amended page into the glass tray, and printed a copy for every member of the committee.
She walked back into the chamber. She handed a warm piece of paper to each congressman. She smiled politely.
And then she said: "Knowing the Members composing this committee as well as I do, I'm sure it was just an oversight that we didn't have 's*x' or 'marital status' included. I've taken care of that, and I trust it meets with the committee's approval."
She framed their exclusion of half the population as a shared mistake. She gave them a gracious exit. She made it easy to say yes.
The committee voted. Forty-seven to zero. Unanimous.
President Gerald Ford signed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act into law on October 28, 1974. For the first time in American history, banks could no longer legally deny a woman credit based on her s*x or marital status. A widow with an inheritance no longer needed a male relative to co-sign. A single teacher with a steady salary no longer needed her father's signature. A woman supporting her family — even if her husband was an unemployed law student, as Billie Jean King's was — could apply for a credit card in her own name.
In 2019, Time magazine created special covers honoring the most significant women of each year since 1920. For 1974, they chose Lindy Boggs.
She went on to serve nine terms in Congress. In 1997, President Clinton appointed her United States Ambassador to the Vatican, where she served until she was 85. She died in 2013 at age 97.
Her daughter was the journalist Cokie Roberts, who spent years telling audiences about what her mother had done in that committee room — because Lindy Boggs herself rarely talked about it.
It was, she seemed to feel, the obvious thing to do.
Every day, millions of credit cards are swiped at grocery counters, gas stations, and online checkouts. The names embossed in the plastic belong to women. The banks process the transactions without question, in milliseconds, without asking for a father's signature or a husband's permission.
That is the world Lindy Boggs made. With a pen, a copy machine, and the quiet confidence of a woman who had finally decided to stop standing behind the powerful men in the room and start being one herself.
